Maxwell covers a day of ups and downs, including the fabled blogging panel in a post he likes to call A Sudden Sense of Bleakness – Friday:

Butcher was passionate about his assertions regarding the independence of bloggers and the necessity of them facing down the big companies and calling their bluffs about media blackouts and the like. Of course, this led to a conversation about comics journalism as a whole, and frankly I’m not sure that most bloggers fall into the category of journalists uncovering stories. I may get back to this topic at another time, but there’s a number of things preventing these folks from acting as “realâ€? journalists, some of which have to do with their actual jobs and that blogging is only half of what they do, resources needed to do these jobs, etc. We were once in the wild west phase of blogging, but now we’re being settled down, barbed wire fences now marking out territories and things are changing. Perhaps we’ll get to the point where a site like Newsarama will become an entity that’s able to fund real journalism (contrary to popular belief, it doesn’t just spring into the world via spontaneous generation.) Until then, it’ll be folks who are passionate and driven by that.